Until very recently, electoral politics has been a contest of façades, rhetorical and visual simulacra competing with other ones. Somewhere underneath it all, real flesh-and-blood people are straitjacketed in talking-points and boilerplate, forming over them like a full-body mask.

This is such a commonplace that no one questions it. We expect it. Even those of us who like to get at the root of things -- literally, radicals -- find ourselves quite at home in this discursive world of the anodyne, the commonplace, the glib and thoughtless formulation. We, too, share in the babbled, incoherent language of somnambulists, and speak it too often ourselves.

"He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it." - George Orwell, "Shooting An Elephant"

Much has already been said on the Boyden scandal, more than likely too much. I would be foolhardy indeed to attempt to recapitulate the eloquence of indigenous writers and scholars like Hayden King, and will not make any such attempt here. Instead, as a white, relatively comfortable Canadian, I'd like to come at the issue tangentially: in particular, regarding the question of identity itself.

The Liberal government, trying to recover from Minister Maryam Monsef's astonishingly bumbled performance in the House of Commons last week, has decided to seek a little consultation camouflage, using an online survey that has already been roundly mocked for its heavy-handed tendentiousness.

"Trump's election is going to be the biggest 'fuck you' ever recorded in human history -- and it will feel good....He is the human Molotov cocktail that they've been waiting for, the human hand grenade that they can legally throw into the system."

-- Michael Moore

Last night I learned a lesson. And I now have questions about everything I have lazily taken for granted over the decades of my life, both political and personal.

I think Moore got it right several months ago, but it runs much deeper. Not everyone who voted for Trump was financially ruined by free trade and Wall Street. Not all of them were racist and sexist hooligans.